The traditional hard drive market has been under assault from various factors over the last several years. One of the biggest factors affecting hard drives has been the decline in the computer industry. With fewer sales of computers, fewer hard drives are required leading to declining profits. At the same time, as notebooks get thinner, manufacturers are increasingly using solid-state drives.

Market research firm iSuppli reports that hard drive market revenue is expected to decline in double-digit numbers during 2013. The research firm is predicting revenue of $32.7 billion for 2013, a decline of 11.8% from 2012. The research firm also believes that revenue for the hard drive market will be flat in 2014 with a revenue forecast of $32 billion.

“The HDD industry will face myriad challenges in 2013,” said Fang Zhang, analyst for storage systems at IHS. “Shipments for desktop PCs will slip this year, while notebook sales are under pressure as consumers continue to favor smartphones and tablets. The declining price of SSDs also will allow them to take away some share from conventional HDDs.”

ISuppli also expects that gross and operating margins for hard drive manufacturers will continue to decline thanks to price erosion in the market. Despite declining profits, the research firm predicts that hard drives will continue to be the dominant form of storage during 2013, particularly in the ultrabook and business realms.

Not sure about everyone else but because of the excessive hard drive prices.

I cleaned out a ton of junk and old stuff I didn't need.

Discovered SSD drives like many others so my Home PC, laptop, and server got SSD drives and those hard drives that were replaced by SSD's filled my need for additional hard drive space and backups. (4 hard drives replaced by SSD) Put laptop drive in an external enclosure and picked up a two bay USB 3.0 dock.

I moved important data to BLU-RAY 25gig disks at under $1.00 a disk. Mainly pictures, home movies, files etc. Still have a stack of blanks and I see the price has come down to around 65 cents a disk now.

I've had enough CDR/DVDR failures as disks aged over the years that I wouldn't trust them for backups of anything of value.

Any data I consider valuable's stored on at least 2 drives (main computer and home server), soon to be three (USB3 enclosures for server (offsite) backup are in transit), with high value data also backed up to the cloud.

Yeah, but these days a 1Tb hard drive is like $60. So...go ahead and horde.

The last PC I built for myself has a 120gb SSD for the OS and Office installs...and a 2Tb HD that I installed all my other programs and games on, and that I pointed my User folder to. It's a pretty good way to go...especially considering the rock-bottom prices of HDs these days.

That's just it, while low again they aren't at rock-bottom prices right now and they certainly weren't after the floods. You can get HDDs now for $60/TB now sure, but they used to be $40/TB before the floods and then $120/TB right after the floods.The floods didn't hurt the HDD makers, they used it to raise the price, gouge the market and make record profits. I was lucky and didn't have a HDD die while the prices were super high (which is surprising as I have 10 running 24/7, so plan for a failure rate of 2/year).